The Early Steps of Modal and Negation Interactions: Evidence from Child Italian

One difference between natural and formal languages is that natural languages are ambiguous in many respects, one of them being the ambiguity of sentences with more than one logic operator. In this paper we focus on sentences containing negation and modal operators and their interpretation by 4and 5-years old. In many cases, a sentence with multiple operators is ambiguous and grammars of human languages need formal means to express a one-to-many mapping from a sentence to its different possible meanings. A widely shared assumption is that such a mapping can be generated by the application of non-visible movement operations, which make available interpretations different from the ones that can be read off the surface syntax (see Fox (2000), May (1985), Reinhart (1997), Reinhart (2006)). To illustrate, a sentence like (1):